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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;Tom Maringer, post: 197912, member: 7033&quot;]<b>A winner!&nbsp; ---&nbsp; Skylark</b></p><p><br /></p><p>Yes I have to agree that Skylark has it closest of all... the only one to get the bit about cap&#039;n Jonathan Archer. (Had to have seen the episodes of Enterprise season 4 to get that!) The only error was in the inscriptions... they are bilingual in Irik and Lahai, &quot;Surak&quot; on obverse and &quot;C&#039;thiya&quot; on reverse... but those langauges are so obscure these days that I was afraid nobody would ever figure that out. Skylark, if you will PM me your mailing address I&#039;ll get your prize into the mail for you!</p><p><br /></p><p>So yes, Vulcan was a world of hot emotions, bitter feuds, and a tradition of personal mortal combat to assuage any insult. There was a devastating war between the Irik and Lahai factions that escalated into nuclear weapons and threatened to annihilate the population of the planet. Surak arose in that time. He was the philsopher who formulated the doctrine of C&#039;thiya, which we humans translate as &quot;logic&quot;. But the word has deeper meaning, translating more as &quot;recognizing what is real&quot;. As regards war and conflict, Surak followed the logical process showing that all are harmed by war, both victor and the defeated. Therefore war itself is illogical since there is no benefit. Those who refused Surak&#039;s counsel and declined to denounce war gathered themselves together and departed in a fleet of ships to found the Romulan empire. So there was a split in Vulcan society, with those remaining on the homeworld dedicated to peace and stability through the practice of a meditative self-discipline. As was noted in the responses... the Kir&#039;Shara was an holographic device made by Surak and which contained Surak&#039;s original teachings, in order that they not be lost or distorted. But the Kir&#039;Shara was lost for a long time and only through the events detailed in the previously referenced 3 episodes, was it brought back to the knowledge of scholars and philosophers on Vulcan, saving the planet from a return to warlike ways. </p><p><br /></p><p>It is my own addition to the story to say that Surak instituted the blood token. In Vulcan tradition someone who offers any insult, no matter how slight, can be challenged to mortal combat. The core tradition is too much a part of Vulcan culture to eliminate it entirely, but Surak stipulated that in lieu of combat, the blood token can be offered, and if offered it MUST be accepted. In the early days of the reformation of Vulcan culture many different tokens were thus used and many were quite valuable (which discouraged the offering of insults). Most highly valued of all were tokens made of the very rare element hafnium (Hf, #72 on the periodic table) because it was the use of hafnium radiation armor that allowed the core of Vulcan population to survive the nuclear holocaust and rebuild their society. By the times of Spock hundreds of years later, the use of actual metal tokens had fallen off and the offering and acceptance of them had been reduced to a simple hand gesture, scarcely noticed by offworlders. But still the surviving tokens found use as focal points of meditation on the futility of war and are kept as a remembrance of chaotic times passed. C&#039;thiya adepts still prefer to use the hafnium tokens when they can afford them, but the modern copper reproductions are deemed a reasonable substitute, and being less costly they are avidly collected by tourists from Earth who buy them in the Vulcan spaceport as souvenirs. The few examples that exist here on earth today are thought to have been left by Vulcans who crash landed on Earth in the 1950s and assimilated for a time into our culture.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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